So auctions not only set prices, but also destroyed the façade of negotiation with the enslaved and established a community of right-handed power. The most useful advice was what Charlotte Willis’s grandfather discovered on a Mississippi block: “Better keep [your] feelings hid.” Some channeled pain and fear into silent fury: as he “ascended the auction-block,” remembered one man, “there was hate mingled with my humiliation.” The grim satisfaction of focusing on a tightly controlled kernel of hate—this was all most enslaved survivors of the auction could take away as profit from the sale of their own bodies and futures. But uncertainty, humiliation, and threats stunned most minds on the block. Eventually their bodies revealed the terror. Mothers wailed. Some, physically overwhelmed, couldn’t quite follow what was happening. Incoherent, they could barely stand before eyes that measured them, planned for them. “I’s seen slaves” on Napoleon Street in New Orleans, remembered Elizabeth Hile, fellow slaves “who just come off the auction block.” Staggering away from Maspero’s behind their new owners, they “would be sweating and looking sick.”44
This day, when seventeen-year-old Mary climbed onto the bench after John stepped down, a buzz probably rippled through the crowd. From Mary the crowd sought a particular kind of compliance and entertainment. She was wrapped in a different set of codes than the ones that a man signaled. Dredging up the memory of the auction of his half-white half-sister, which he had to witness in 1830, Tabb Gross recalled that “her appearance excited the whole crowd of spectators.” “Fine young wench!” a woman remembered hearing, on another occasion: “Who will buy? Who will buy?”45
Rachel watched. She had been leered at, too—when she came through the door, all the way back to the point of her sale in Baltimore. It had been going on ever since she reached puberty, but sale time was when the forced sexualization of enslaved women’s bodies was most explicit. Before the 1830s, and sometimes after, whites usually forced women to strip. Robert Williams saw women required to pull down their dresses: each one “would just have a piece around her waist . . . her breast and things would be bare.” In the middle of Smithfield, North Carolina, said Cornelia Andrews, slave sellers “stripped them niggers stark naked and gallop ’em over the square.” In Charleston, enslaved women stood, wrapped only in blankets, on an auction-table in the street. The “vendue-master” described their bodies, and a white bidder who took a woman back into the auctioneer’s shop could take off the blanket.46
Auctioneers and bidders would turn a woman around, raise her skirt, slap “and plump her to show how fat she was.” William Johnson remembered that “bidders would come up and feel the women’s legs—lift up their [g]arments and examine their hips, feel their breast, and examine them to see if they could bear children.” For white people, seeing Mary up on the bench was one of the rewards of membership in the fraternity of entrepreneurs. Men asked questions of a woman that they did not put to John or William, questions that attempted to force her to acknowledge everything that was being bought and sold. Women who refused to play along could expect white anger, as one observer noted: “When answers were demanded to the questions usually put by the bidders to slaves on the block, the tears rolled down her cheeks, and her refusal to answer those most disgusting questions met with blood-curling oaths.” Of course, not all white bidders minded resistance. Some relished overcoming it. It was all part of the game.47
SHE KNEW HER TURN was coming. But as Rachel waited, she heard, punching through the auctioneer’s patter, through the probing questions of the men in the crowd, one word that recurred in the murmurs of the prospective buyers lining up credit with the lenders who would back them. This strange but ordinary word floated and hummed around her, bubbling up her ear canal and knocking on the door of the mind. Likewise, it crawled out of pen nibs and spoke on the papers on which some of the men who were still sitting inside Maspero’s were writing. It rested quietly in the darkness of folded letters, sailing out in leather letter-satchels in the holds of ships, sealed behind wax but ready to burst off the page and into the world. It spoke of a deeper order, a value structuring the seething water of price-setting and price-changing. But it also carried its own chaos: dreams of creation, destruction, greatness, order, progress; machine, metal, fear-sweat and field-sweat, desire amid the hot cotton bales stacked in the shed.
Hand. By the time the auctioneer finished off Mary and announced that William was next, Rachel had heard that word more times that day than she could count. It is a very ordinary word. It was being used in a sense different from the way that entrepreneurs used it when they wrote about their notes of hand and so on—different, but as interlaced with that meaning as a fist. Enslavers’ use of the word “hand” as a metaphor for the right-handed power that they experienced through participation in modernization seems “normal.” Pull the thread of “hand” in Mossy’s auction-talk, and we will find that it was so deeply embedded in the language and practices of the emerging slave market that we have incorporated it into our history of slavery ever since as if it were a natural term. We miss its non-neutrality in our first pass across a sentence, for we are embarrassingly literate in hand-talk. After two centuries, we still translate without thinking John Brandt’s 1818 offering of “Five likely Negro fellows, prime field hands.”
You see five men like William, standing in line beside the bench, don’t you? But try to read William Robertson’s 1816 advertisement literally. He’s planning an auction, at a New Orleans church, of “20 or 30 Negroes, just arrived from Tennessee, consisting principally of working hands.” Or take just as literally the precise language of the Louisiana Gazette’s booster-ish description of the riches that those willing to take the plunge and become planters in its reading area had already gained. Nicholas Lorsselle had “7 hands only,” and yet “he” made forty bales of cotton, and $593 to the hand. A man with only seven hands. Imagine carpals, metacarpals, nails assembled together and coated with seven sets of muscle and skin. See disembodied hands working, but never holding themselves out for payment.48
When Mossy said the word “hand,” white people saw not an appendage with five fingers, but four simple letters that pulled a freight of metaphor and real-world effects. Two thousand years earlier, the Greek philosopher Aristotle called the slave the “instrument” of the owner, “a living tool.” Aristotle gave formal recognition to the idea that the slave was the master’s right-handed will embodied: his hand grasping in the world (his, though shes were enslavers, too). The slave reached when the owner said “reach,” took when the master’s brain sent an impulse down the nerves of social power, all without thinking or reflecting.49
In important ways, Aristotle’s story had always been a lie. Through centuries of slave revolts and endless days of resistance, slaves insisted that they had their own wills. Those wills, in the shape of enslaved Africans, were so strange to Europeans in the first couple of centuries of New World slavery that they did not use the idea of the hand to describe the people whom they held captive. That does not mean they did not try to create as reality the relationships of absolute right-handed power that “hand” implied. But they also developed an ideology claiming that Africans were radically different from Europeans in order to explain away the gap between seemingly unbridgeable cultural difference and resistance, on the one hand, and the dream of the slave as a pure tool, on the other. You can see this in the names they gave to the people whom they drove off of Middle Passage ships and into sugar and tobacco fields, titles that emphasized the otherness of the African—bossales, saltwater slaves, têtes, “heads.”
In the 1810s, however, as right-handed power expanded explosively in the southwestern United States, the word “hand” began to replace “head.” A clerk working for William Kenner quoted prices to customers: “Negroes have sold here lately,” he wrote in 1816, perhaps from a table at Maspero’s, “at 600 [and] 500 dollars per head, for common field hands.” The word began to carry a set of newly possible promises about the people whom it labeled. Hand was the
ideal form of the commodity “slave,” just as white crystals are the ideal commodity form of “sugarcane.” Each person for sale was a commodity: alienable, easily sold, and, in important ways, rendered effectively identical for white entrepreneurs’ direct manipulation.50
Bidders could fit a William, for instance, into the box of the concept “hand,” an idea that experienced entrepreneurs told newbie Natchez planter John Knight was the archetype he should look for in the slave market. “The qualities and requirements to make first-rate plantation hands,” they told him, began with this: “They should be young, say from 16 to 25 years old, stout and active, large deep chest, wide shoulders & hips &c.” To make sure his reader did not miss the point, he underlined and bold-inked his summary: “I wish first-rate hands, young and stout.” Enslavers in the Lower Mississippi Valley wanted to buy those who looked strong enough to bear intense physical labor. Here was William, looking young and stout. And they’d force him to be “active,” because white men made plans for returns and revenue by the hand, anticipating the amount of value they could extract from a human being straitjacketed into the role of commodity. One calculated power and possibility by the number of hands needed to fell an acre of trees, one denominated the rate of return from ground cleared or cottonseed planted by the hand. E. B. Hicks used hands as a unit of accounting and “put as many hands on the river plantation” as his business partner.51
The word delivered because it was continually recalculated from a thousand different economic relations. As he was buying enslaved people, the white man, in his mind’s eye, saw himself working them, reselling them, mortgaging them, making them into money, putting them “in his pocket”—to use the words of slave owners’ threats to many a “hand.” And here at Maspero’s, sellers, auctioneers, buyers, and bidders did specific things to make whole people look and in certain ways to be like the obedient right hands of enslavers’ future endeavors. They worked to assure buyers that the person on the bench, brought so many miles from home by coffle-chain, could call on no sources of external power countervailing against that of the purchaser. “It is better to buy none in families, but to select only choice, first rate, young hands from 16 to 25 years of age (buying no children or aged negroes),” those same old Natchez planters quoted above told John Knight. Before American acquisition, Louisiana enslavers had bought children, adults, and older adults in percentages proportionate to their presence in the population. But after the purchase and the establishment of new trade routes and robust systems of credit, entrepreneurs bidding at Maspero’s began to demand that eastern sellers send them young adults ready to start work right away, and able to produce profits for years to come. By the five-year period starting in 1815, almost 45 percent of the enslaved people bought from other states were between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five: more than twice as many as the number between twenty-six and forty-four, and significantly more than the children aged thirteen and under (see Tables 3.2 and 3.3).52
Enslavers wanted to buy people who had no claim to a special status—who were as unformed as Henry Watson had been in the eyes of Natchez buyer Alexander McNeill. This characteristic made it much easier to talk about them as disembodied hands. But many of those sold at Maspero’s had in fact acquired various kinds of specialized expertise in the East. In the Chesapeake and Carolinas, enslaved men rose in status by learning trades. They might be blacksmiths or coopers, teamsters or house servants. Women could become servants, cooks, or weavers. Such skills could gain one respite from incessant field labor, or even give hired-out slaves the possibility of keeping some of the earnings. Artisans were even important in Louisiana. Sugar making, for instance, required a class of trained enslaved experts who supervised the boiling process. They sold for high prices. Whites identified 5 percent of local slaves sold in New Orleans from 1800 to 1820 with a specific skill.53
TABLE 3.2. AGE GROUP DISTRIBUTION OF ENSLAVED PEOPLE SOLD IN NEW ORLEANS, 1800–1804
TABLE 3.3. AGE GROUP DISTRIBUTION OF ENSLAVED PEOPLE SOLD IN NEW ORLEANS, 1815–1820
Source: Hall Database, www.ibiblio.org/laslave/. “Known to be imported” includes those with a non-Louisiana origin, as noted by the database. “Not known to be imported” clearly includes a large number of those imported. Some of these we can identify from newspaper advertisements. If they have a similar age profile to those in the “Known to be imported” group, and were moved to that group, then the difference between the two rows might be even starker.
Skills meant that one could claim some authority over a task and tools, a kind of capital accumulated during a unique past. African Americans sent to New Orleans came to Maspero’s with individual job-related identities. But they came out with those skills erased, at least from the perspective of a claim that they could make on the enslaver. Many a newspaper advertisement for a man from the Chesapeake stated these skills. For example: “ANTHONY, 23,” who was to be sold January 5, 1819, at Maspero’s, was identified as a “sawyer, plough man, driver and good axeman” who had been “working in a brickyard.” “NORA, 22,” was advertised as an “excellent house servant, good seamstress, washer and ironer, good disposition and careful mother.” All fifteen women advertised for that particular sale were described as possessing house-servant skills—washing, cooking, cleaning, ironing, caring for children. Yet none appeared as a house servant on the bill of sale. Of the thirty-four men offered, the newspaper advertisement claimed that twenty-seven possessed skills: carpenter, cooper, blacksmith, teamster, and so on. Not a single one had a skill listed upon his sale document, even though enslavers listed skills on similar bills for enslaved people of local origin. Only 1.5 percent of the bills of sale for enslaved people shipped from Norfolk and sold in New Orleans in 1815 to 1820 list a skill. The other 98.5 percent might not have come from the fields, but field hands they now were.
The “handness” of Virginia and Maryland slaves—the English (not French) names of the men, their greater stature, the plain kerchief of the women (not an artfully tied chignon like the ones Anglo visitors to New Orleans always noted), the claim that every one of them was raised waiting the table of a Virginia gentleman who had fallen on hard times—such narratives suggested that here was a standard story who could be forced to become a standard hand: “Very smart and willing. . . . [You] can turn his hand to anything. . . . [A] most valuable subject.” You could take away their pasts and make them seem both the ready instrument and the object of the entrepreneur’s right-handed power. Enslavers counted on the massive geographic shift over land and water to the southwest, the separations, the silencing, the distance, and the shock of the process of sale to produce isolation and helplessness. That made human beings look—to buyers—like hands. Resistance to handification certainly happened. Many forced migrants from Chesapeake and Kentucky ran away from purchasers in the Lower Mississippi Valley in the late 1810s, as numerous newspaper ads testify. But they also seem to have been far more likely than locals to be caught quickly, to return, or to die in the process. They had fewer—or no—places to hide, and surely fewer people to help them hide.54
“The sugar and cotton plantations[,] . . . we knew all about them,” said Lewis Hayden, remembering a childhood in Kentucky in the 1810s. “When a friend was carried off, why, it was the same as death.” One way or another, the sale at Maspero’s marked one as a hand and meant that an old life was over. Right here, on this January day, for instance, William was about to be torn from the last few people who had known him in Maryland. As the bidding on him crept upward—six hundred, seven hundred—something piqued the interest of a white man in the crowd. Though several bidders already contested the prize, when Louisiana enslaver James Stille made his entry, he did so with determination. The numbers rose higher as Mossy chanted. When Stille’s bid hit nine hundred, a typical price at this time for a man of William’s age, a hush settled on the crowd. Would someone go higher? At last Mossy’s hammer came down to break the silence. (Where did it hit—the wall of the building? Perhaps he tappe
d it on William’s head. Some auctioneers did this, infuriating the people they sold.) A white helper stepped forward to lead William down off the bench and walk the new hand back into the shop as Stille continued shopping. After the sunlight, the darkness disoriented William. The white man sat him down against a wall. Beyond a new clamor outside, William could surely hear the earlier-sold people who now sat next to him: perhaps a woman sobbing, a man panting. Or was he making those noises himself?55
Meanwhile, Rachel stepped up, onto the bench.
IF SHE COULD GET her eyes to focus, Rachel tried to read the faces. In the East, the constant exchange of information among the enslaved made it possible for the people being sold to know the reported characters of many possible masters. But Rachel was trapped in full view in a new place where the face of every enslaver was unknown to her. She did not know, for instance, as the auctioneer’s voice rose, that one of the men bidding for her was William Fitz, a merchant trading here and in Baton Rouge.
Whether Rachel experienced the minutes through which she stood on the bench as hate, shame, terror, or exposure, she had to face the crowd. And she faced it alone. If Rachel had a husband, he does not appear to have come in the Temperance with her. Neither did any children. Yet, given her age—about twenty-five—and the average age of first childbirth for an enslaved woman in the Chesapeake—just over twenty—the odds are good that she had children. She was not alone in being alone. Of the twenty-eight slaves sold by McLean at Maspero’s on January 28, only two—twenty-three-year-old Sophie and her young child—had any discernable family relationship to each other.56
Throughout the history of slavery in the Southeast, infants and mothers had typically been sold, given, moved, granted, and deeded together. The infant followed the mother in condition, since the womb was “slave” and the child of a slave mother was thus also the enslaved property of her owner. Often the infant literally followed the mother from place to place. Here, however, the ideal hand did not come with a family. Slave sellers and buyers conspired to break attachments between parents and children—usually before their removal to New Orleans, but sometimes at Maspero’s itself. Out of 2,567 women twenty-one years old and up sold by enslavers in New Orleans between 1815 and 1820, we can prove that at least 553 came from outside the city. Of these, enslavers bought 525 without children. Whether women like Rachel did or did not leave children behind in Maryland, they stood on the block alone. Meanwhile, only in 6 of 553 cases did New Orleans sellers deal the women’s husbands with them. Even if one includes those whose origins we cannot demonstrate from the records of sale, between 1815 and 1820 only 8 women of 2,567 were sold with their husbands, and only 3 with both husband and child. Clearly, more than 1 percent of all the enslaved women over twenty, whether in Louisiana or throughout the South, were married with children.57
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